Can Israel’s Opposition Unseat Netanyahu?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Rachel Abrams (0:34)

From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

SPEAKER_3 (0:40)

The situation here is a bad situation. I was born here.

SPEAKER_1 (0:44)

I never saw a situation like this.

Rachel Abrams (0:47)

More than two weeks after one of the most consequential elections in Israel's history, there is still so much uncertainty among voters about who will lead the country.

SPEAKER_3 (0:57)

20 years. I think you have to go home with it.

Rachel Abrams (1:00)

It seems like the longest serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could be on the way out.

SPEAKER_4 (1:06)

I don't really know if I'm in favor or not of Eisenkot because it's very difficult for me to believe in anyone nowadays in Israel.

Rachel Abrams (1:17)

And so the spotlight has fallen on opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot, who is trying to make all kinds of deals with disparate political parties who have different wants and different needs in order to actually build a coalition that could run the government.

SPEAKER_4 (1:29)

What I would like is the Israeli society to get unified and get together once and for all.

Rachel Abrams (1:37)

But the choices about who to partner with and how, they are just not simple.

SPEAKER_5 (1:42)

Now he has to compromise.

SPEAKER_4 (1:44)

He has to go either with the religious or with the Arabs.

Rachel Abrams (1:48)

And so today on the show, Jerusalem bureau chief at Halbfinger explains the kinds of compromises that Eisenkot will need to make if he wants to run the country.

SPEAKER_6 (1:57)

It's Israel's last chance to become a country with some sort of sanity. It's an insane place at the moment.

Rachel Abrams (2:05)

And what will happen if he can't pull it off?

It's Friday, November 13th.

David Halbfinger, welcome back to The Daily. Great to be here. The last time we spoke, you had prepared us for an election that a lot of Israelis thought of as existential and one whose results were going to be kind of messy and unclear. That seems to have borne out. We're talking to you more than two weeks after the election. We don't have a clear answer and the path forward, from what I can tell, is going to be not just complicated, but also, as you prepared us for, have seismic political implications for a country that has been so long dominated by one guy. So catch us up, David, on what has happened since election day.

David Halbfinger (2:58)

So the election was huge. There was an incredible turnout in this election, but there was no clear winner. Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the opposition, was given the chance to form the government because he heads the largest coalition. But who will be in that government? It remains unclear and very much in doubt. He would have to put together a coalition that is incredibly diverse and in some cases at odds with itself. That's an incredibly difficult thing to do, but he can't afford to fail.

So he's got a month, a maximum of six weeks, to try to put together a government that can lead this country.

Rachel Abrams (3:36)

What happens if at the end of that six weeks, he is unable to get a government together?

David Halbfinger (3:41)

So if Eisenkot fails, it's likely that Netanyahu would be given the next chance to form a government. He would then get four weeks, and then it could go to the parliament itself. The Knesset would have three weeks to choose a candidate. But if all of that fails, the parliament would dissolve and we'd have three months until new elections are held.

Netanyahu is the caretaker prime minister. He's the incumbent. And if he remains the incumbent while we go to new elections, that gives him an enormous advantage and a much stronger shot at winning again.

Rachel Abrams (4:13)

So what does Eisenkot actually have to do over these next four, or as you said, six weeks to build a coalition?

David Halbfinger (4:20)

So with the four parties that are squarely in his coalition right now, he has a total of 48 seats in parliament.

Ideally, he comes up with a coalition that has 61 seats out of the 120 in parliament. Behind it, at least, that's a simple majority, a real majority in parliament.